The present invention relates generally to minimally invasive methods for performing cardiac medical and/or surgical procedures, and more particularly to percutaneous methods for performing a coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) procedure on a patient in need thereof.
Coronary artery disease remains a leading cause of morbidity and mortality in Western societies. A number of approaches have been developed for treating coronary artery disease. It is often sufficient to treat the symptoms with pharmaceuticals and lifestyle modification to lessen the underlying causes of the disease. In more severe cases, the coronary stenoses may be treated endovascularly using techniques such as balloon angioplasty, atherectomy, laser ablation, stenting, thrombectomy, and the like.
In still more severe cases where pharmaceutical treatment and/or conventional endovascular approaches have failed or are likely to fail, it may be necessary to perform a coronary artery bypass graft procedure using open surgical techniques. Such techniques require that a patient's sternum be opened, the chest spread apart to provide access to the heart, and the heart stopped. While very effective in many cases, the use of open surgery to perform coronary artery bypass grafting is highly traumatic to the patient. The procedure requires immediate postoperative care in an intensive care unit, hospitalization for five to ten days, and a recovery period as long as six to eight weeks.
Alternative techniques have been devised to perform coronary bypass surgical procedures thorascopically. Examples of such procedures are disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,131,447 and U.S. Pat. No. 7,028,692 to Sterman et al., and in U.S. Pat. No. 5,888,247 to Benetii. Although such methods are believed to decrease morbidity, mortality, cost, and recovery time when compared to conventional open surgical coronary bypass procedures, they still require stopping the patient's heart and placing the patient on cardiopulmonary bypass.
It would be desirable to provide a better method for performing a coronary bypass procedure that is less invasive than open surgical or thorascopic techniques. It would also be desirable to provide an interventional procedure that does not require use of cardiopulmonary bypass.